


anywhere i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done

by spacenarwhal



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-08
Updated: 2017-07-08
Packaged: 2018-11-29 14:36:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11442921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacenarwhal/pseuds/spacenarwhal
Summary: Rey offers Finn her hand and he takes it and together they lever themselves up out of the sand and run, and inside, inside, there is a pull, fragments of something like recognition, like coming home. It isn’t something either of them are familiar with and the word escapes them, buried under the rush of adrenaline that carries them away.





	anywhere i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done

**Author's Note:**

> So I saw [this really lovely gif set on tumblr ](http://the-space-narwhal.tumblr.com/post/160533148992/emilieblunt-so-much-time-on-the-other-side-for#tumblr_notes) and it got me thinking. Which lead to this actual note I scribbled in draft email weeks ago:
> 
>  
> 
> _30 years between rotj and tfa_
> 
>  
> 
> _that's plenty of time for reincarnation y'all_
> 
>  
> 
> _I'm gonna do it_
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> And so I did

She'll never remember. So few do. She is Rey first, she will always be Rey first, just as she was someone else before, and someone else before that. Just as she'll be someone different after.

She is Rey and her life is a single grain of sand in a desert-world of souls, unimportant and unremarkable as far back as she can remember. She learns all about waiting even as she teaches herself everything she can from the bones of wars people once said were over, its battles won and its heroes immortalized in tales whispered among workers. She fills herself with history, with stories, memorizes the creaking sound of a fellow scavengers laughter, learns binary and how to swing a staff hard enough to keep potential thieves at bay. Rey learns to take care of herself because there is nothing else for it, fills her life with what she can and treasures every piece of it she can call her own. She makes her home in the hollow of a decrepit Imperial walker, keeps dried desert flowers long after their bloom has passed and dreams of an incoming ship on the horizon

Rey is alone and Rey is lonely. In some ways it is all she’s ever known. (They say the soul remembers what the mind cannot, that loneliness leaves a mark like engine grease on tarmac, slick and iridescent and nearly impossible to remove).

Rey picks up scraps and keeps whatever won't earn her meal rations. Her fingers have always been quick to figure out the inner workings of things. She likes to know what makes things live, learns all the ways there are to listen to the heart of an engine, the guts of a ship, how to coax life back into rusted, broken things. One of the old scavengers calls her a necromancer, claims its magic that lets Rey bring even the worst garbage back from the brink. 

"I just take a chance." Rey answers, a scrawny desert rat, all of sixteen, burnt and scraped red by the sand storm blowing through the outpost where they work. "And hope for the best."

"That's a lot to trust to chance and hope." The old scavenger says, flashing a toothless grin.

Rey shrugs, broken nails trying to pry a bolt loose where it has apparently fused into place. "I don't have much else to go on." 

No one really does.

-

He had a name before he ever had a serial number but FN-2187 is all he knows now. He looks at Nines and Slip and Zeroes and all the other troopers, overhears the names they give one another but do not offer him and feels a world apart from them. He wonders what he might call himself if he had a chance. What someone might call him if he were more than FN-2187. 

But this is all he's ever known, he’s grown up clenched tight in the unyielding grip of the First Order, learned to shoot a blaster as early as he did to walk or talk, was never thought to think beyond the glory of the First Order. Everything he has been, everything he is, everything he'll ever be is in service of this one cause, their cause. They expect it to be his cause as well, demand it every single day of his life he can remember and all the ones he can't, but it isn’t. 

He is a stormtrooper, encased in gleaming white armor like a shell, his face concealed behind a mask that looks identical to the solider on his right and the one on his left, but he knows them all. By serial number. By self-appointed names. He knows them even if they do not want to know him and when he is ordered to raise his blaster against a village of unarmed civilians his finger—trained all his life for one purpose—freezes on the trigger.

The village goes up in screams and flames but FN-2187 does not shoot. He doesn't. (The words form a mantra that runs itself smooth inside his head. _I didn't shoot, did I?_ He asks himself again and again, looking at Rey, starlight reflected in her eyes as she peers out the cockpit of the Falcon. _I didn't shoot._ )

-

Finn takes her hand and they fall together, blasted off their feet by enemy fire, the hot sands of Jakku scratching at their skin and inside, inside there is a pull.. This is not the first time they find each other. They've done it before. So many times it's impossible to keep track. All those lives building one over the other like so much sand, petrified to solid rock somewhere deep inside them. Neither of them know that.

(But they feel—“Welcome home.” And the mirthful tilt of his mouth, her eyes full of astonishment and happiness, so out of place in the face of their mission, this is the youngest either of them has felt in nearly a decade, staring at one another, prepared for war—they feel.)

_Before_ is a human word used to denote time, segment it neatly into comprehensible pieces. Befores and afters, linear and forward moving. She is Rey. He is Finn. That is who they are now. Now is all that exists. Even afters do not exist until they are present.

The Force, Luke Skywalker will explain later on a grey stone island at the center of a green sea, connects all of them. He's right, even if it is in ways he only suspects. What he knows as the Force does connect them—Luke to Rey and Rey to Finn and Finn to Poe and Poe to Leia and Leia to Han and Han to Ben--all of them bound together in life and death, but it connects them each to themselves. Befores and afters. A bisecting line stringing them all together no matter how far apart.

Rey offers Finn her hand and he takes it and together they lever themselves up out of the sand and run, and inside, inside, there is a pull, fragments of something like recognition, like coming home. It isn’t something either of them are familiar with and the word escapes them, buried under the rush of adrenaline that carries them away. 

-

The last time went by too quickly. Sand and flame, arms fastened tight around one another, their short, harsh lives given up in the name of hope.

_I wish_ , he thought in those last fleeting seconds, pain and peace one in the same inside his broken body, _I wish_.

He held her and she held him, kept him from tumbling into the sun-soaked sand as their death came forward, the plans transmitted into the great expanse of space dangling overhead, like starlight in the distance. The sky burned green and then gold and then turned to blinding white and Jyn shut her eyes and held him. Against her breast her mother's kyber crystal sang a funeral dirge, but Jyn’s heart held only a prayer, quick and formless, sent out into the universe before she disappeared. 

_I wish_ , the man named Cassian Andor thought in the fragment of a second before the wave of light took them both. It was a fragment of a thought before the end, a sliver of a dream in a dreamless life.

-

On Starkiller Base Rey wraps her arms around Finn fast as bindings. Her skin burns hot beneath his palm where it covers the back of her neck and he can feel her vertebrae beneath her skin, the press of her ribs against his chest. This sun-flare girl whose eyes lock on his and make him wish for more than he knew he could want from himself. "You came back." She whispers, and there's no word she knows in all the languages she speaks or understands to describe the feeling that wells up inside her at the thought, like something climbing out of a dark chasm, rising to the surface after its been given up for lost.

In her arms he is the greatest miracle she's never hoped for, as beautiful as the green expanse of Takodana rising up to greet the Falcon, as the sweet as the berries Maz Kanata placed on her plate and just as foreign to her as both. As incredible.

 _I wish_ , Rey thinks later, covering his fallen body in the snow, the cold seeping in her bones and out of her heart, the memory of a lightsaber cutting through the dark, red, blue, loss shivering in the air between them, crawling over her skin. Fire. Ice.

 _I wish_ , she thinks draping her head carefully over Finn's chest, listens for his heart over the beating of her own as beneath them the planet trembles and groans, tectonic plates and durasteel shifting, giving way. She can't carry him, not far, and the thought of dragging him through the snow makes her own body ache, hurt hangs heavy on them both as though the lightsaber had cut them both down.

Finn came for her and Rey will stay with him, will rest her head on his chest and listen for his heart, match her breathing to his and let the world fall away beneath them. Neither of them will be alone again.

 _I wish_ , she thinks and wants so much, so much more for them then this, but this is enough, it is already more than she’s ever had before. (“The belonging you seek is not behind you. It is ahead.” Maz Kanata had promised and Rey didn’t believe it until now, until here, Finn’s chest almost still beneath her sweat-chilled cheek and a planet dying beneath her knees. “I’m here.” She whispers into the darkness and she hopes Finn can hear her, hopes he knows she has him. He has her. They belong to each other now, however short now has proved.)

 _I’m here_. Rey thinks. _I am not afraid._

She closes her eyes—

_I wish._

The world floods with immaculate white light.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from 'i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)' by e.e. cummings
> 
> Feel free to come say hi on [tumblr](http://the-space-narwhal.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
